Managers

The cognitive paradox of the manager in the age of artificial intelligence: between algorithmic efficiency and loss of creativity

The paradoxical effect of artificial intelligence on the role of the manager: more information but less creativity, more precision but less vision

by Francesco Ciampi

18 April 2025

(AdobIl paradosso cognitivo del manager nell’era dell’intelligenza artificiale: tra efficienza algoritmica e perdita di creativitàe Stock)

3' min read

Key points

Ai's predictive power grows: scenarios

3' min read

At a time when artificial intelligence demonstrates a capacity for analysis superior to any human mind, the manager finds himself more informed but less creative, more precise but less visionary, more efficient but less free.

It is the cognitive paradox of the algorithmic manager: delegating analytical thinking to the machine frees up time and resources but ends up stiffening the ability to think out of the box.

Ai makes it possible to formulate more accurate market forecasts, elaborate complex scenarios, discover hidden and latent patterns and relationships within huge volumes of data, enhancing management's ability to decide and act quickly and on a perceived objective basis. However, this algorithmic objectivity risks becoming an invisible factor of cognitive distortion, leading to confusing depth with precision and intuition with analysis.

Algorithms learn and base their processing on phenomena that have already been observed, recorded, classified and, as such, referred to the past. The manager who relies too much on artificial intelligence runs the risk of taking decisions that are as predictable as the models he consults and of losing the aptitude to break patterns, imagine the new, glimpse possibilities that data cannot yet tell.

In this sense, the Ai can become a cognitive cage, which encourages a linear and deductive form of thinking and discourages deviation, ambiguity and surprise.

Ai's predictive power grows: scenarios

As the predictive power of Ai grows,the courage to disobey the numbers and imagine alternative, unexpected, yet possible scenarios fades. Divergent thinking, the irreplaceable engine of strategic innovation and competitive advantage, is compressed by the search for efficiency and managerial decision-making is flattened by optimisation.

But optimising is not innovating and foreseeing is not understanding.

Efficiency does not generate future if it is not driven by a tension towards the possible, towards what does not yet exist.

The risk is that the manager ends up unlearning how to think strategically; that the excessive delegation to algorithmic analysis atrophies the capacities of intuition, vision, reading of contexts in their paradoxes and ambiguity; and that a new form of 'cognitive dependence' on the algorithm develops, with uncertainty no longer considered as an opportunity to generate meaning, but as an error to be corrected.

A further danger is the impoverishment of the values of the manager's role: if his or her function is reduced to the transposition and application of the results generated by algorithms, the responsibility to decide, to assume the burden of choice even when the data are ambiguous, insufficient or contradictory, is diminished.

It is unthinkable to renounce the immense potential of Ai

It is unthinkable to renounce the immense potential of Ai. However, it is crucial to prevent automatic intelligence from replacing or diminishing human creativity and to defend the strategic role of the manager as a keeper of questions, curator of visions, architect of the unexpected. Artificial intelligence must enhance the process of analysis and help to interpret data in a deeper and more precise way, not replace the will to break the mould, the ability to grasp the unprecedented, the courage to go against the tide.

Therefore, it becomes essential to promote a 5.0 culture of management oriented towards the development of the ability to read, interpret, and contextualise the output of algorithms; one that values complexity, the dialectic between analysis and intuition, between rigour and imagination. It is also necessary to develop and consolidate an ethics of discernment, which restores to the manager the freedom to err in order to learn, and not only the responsibility to optimise.

The manager of the future will have to be able to see the exception where Ai detects the rule, to choose the unexpected when the model suggests the usual. The cognitive paradox is not resolved by opposing the Ai wave, but by rediscovering the human value of divergent thinking: if artificial intelligence knows the answers, the manager must have the courage to ask the questions that have not yet been asked.

Full Professor of Economics and Business Management, University of Florence

francesco.ciampi@unifi.it

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